Currently, fabric-based systems, e.g. RapidIO (RIO), PCI Express (PCIe), and Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI), require deep technical knowledge of the protocol and software to be able to initiate and extract information therefrom. RIO, PCIe and ASI architectures are electronic data communications standards for interconnecting chips on a circuit board and circuit boards using a backplane. The RapidIO architecture, for example, is designed to be used for the processor and peripheral interface where bandwidth and low latency are crucial. RapidIO, like ASI, was designed for embedded systems, primarily for networking and communications equipment, enterprise storage, and other high-performance embedded markets. PCIe, while originally developed for the Server market, is now also finding applications within the embedded systems. In addition to technical requirements, the high-performance embedded market requires an open standard interconnect. Currently, the market suffers from an overabundance of proprietary buses, requiring standard product and ASIC-based bridges to connect the various devices in the system. The RapidIO interconnect provides a common connection architecture for general purpose RISC processors, digital signal processors, communications processors, network processors, memory controllers, peripheral devices, and bridges to legacy buses, which benefits users by reducing cost, time-to-market, and complexity.
Existing fabric-based technology tools provide a method of interrogation, i.e. discovering what is in the network, which utilizes a series of command line instructions, e.g. command>function_name parameter1, parameter2, parameter3. Alternatively, specific software could be written to perform the discovery algorithm, and provide a table of data, which would need to be manually deciphered to understand the system and what the system interconnections look like. Furthermore, simple functions, such as accessing specific properties of the devices must be executed through use of one or more command line functions, followed by an interpretation of a register hexadecimal number.
Checking the operation of processing elements, as well as the links therebetween, also necessitated the use of one or more command line functions, and the user's interpretation of a register value/number to understand if something is not functioning properly and to identify what that might be. The operation check is also complicated because different devices in a system may encode the information in different ways, so you would need to memorize codes or have reference manuals at the ready for each device.
In order for the registers in remote parts of the system to be monitored or edited one or more command line functions would have to be manually entered, including the data needed to tell the computer which node in the network you wish to interrogate and which register address you wish to read. Subsequently, the register contents/value would be provided, which would require the user to manually interpret the data to understand what the values mean. Similarly, system performance monitoring could only be executed through the use of one or more command line functions to obtain performance register values, which would have to be manually interpreted to understand what the values mean.
Visualizing data paths was not possible in conventional system; however, the information could be manually gathered through multiple command line functions, and the manual interpretation of the output to provide the user with data path information. Similarly, routing table data could only be obtained through the use of one or more command line functions, and the manual calculation of the appropriate hop counts and identifying destination IDs.
Network management software is common to LAN/WAN type networks, in which nodes are pieces of computer systems, e.g. Servers, routers, gateways; however, a fully interactive network management and diagnostic tool for processing elements, e.g. processors, memory, bridges and switches, has never existed in the embedded world. Conventional network management software provides a picture of an element in a network map; however, to interact with the element the machine address and the specific register addresses and offsets must be known and specified.
An object of the present invention is to overcome the shortcomings of the prior art by providing a user interface, which not only extracts the information relating to the elements of a fabric embedded network, but analyzes and graphically illustrates the information providing design, monitoring and management functionality. Another object of the present invention is to provide the user with a fully interactive network map, which enables the user to visually select any processing element from within the map, and, by using a variety of mouse/button initiated functions, force operations on the processing element to either read information, write information, or monitor information associated with that specific device. An interactive map enables the user to operate on what they see in the map, and derives machine addressing details in the background.